Edinburgh (7 page)

They parent me in a team, these two, my mother teaches me about people, my father about science. These subjects each teach me patience about the other. My mother and I sit quietly in the car as we consider this evaluation of me. All of my friends are in the choir, I say to her, finally, and she nods as she takes me home.

16

THE PLASTER SAW
takes the cast off in a minute. Beneath, my arm is a scaly white thing, the dark hairs stand out starkly. How's that feel, the doctor says. Smiling. Rose-colored fat man, big black-framed glasses.

Fine, I say. I stretch it forward. Fine. And this is not a lie. The hand looks like it belongs to a monster. I think of my mother's rose cuttings, covered up for a month, until the branch, in desperation, grows new roots to live. This hand, it looks like it is ready to grow a whole new boy off itself.

Out in the waiting room, my mother stands as I come out the door. There's my little tree climber, she says. In the car, on the way home, the sunlight yawns through the trees, more faraway fire. Soon the clocks will go forward, the nights shrink close like turtleneck collars.

17

YOU, AS THE
chorus, Big Eric tells the opera choir, are supposed to be innocent choirboys, and yet you all are supposed to act as if you are passionately in love with Floria Tosca. And you are both.

Saturday mornings belong to Opera now: the eight of us meet in the church room alone to rehearse, and soon, we will rehearse with the rest of the cast and orchestra. While my little brother and sister watch the Smurfs, I learn songs about vengeance, love, and slow death. Today Big Eric is explaining to us the role we have in the opera. The coffee he has brought bitters the room's air while we all drink hot tea with lemon to clear and tone our throats. Again, it reassures me less to know the history here. The story, though, is a good one: Tosca, the lover of a handsome painter, Cavaradossi, betrays him in order to protect him from his torturer. Tosca can save her lover by giving herself to the torturer, and she says she will in exchange for a mock execution. He comes to her and she instead, impulsively, stabs him to death with his dinner knife, in his chambers. She then visits her lover in prison, assures him of his safety, rushes to his side after the firing squad, only to find he really is dead. The torturer's murder is discovered, and his police come for Tosca, who then flings herself from a parapet to her death.

Operas, Big Eric announces, as he walks the room in long paces, are mainly about betrayals in love. Squalid light surrounds him from the stained-glass windows as he says this. His round bald head gleams, recently polished, he tells us, and from above the ears, the remaining hair, vigorous, grows long, to meet his mustache and beard.

After, he comes up to me. How did you like
Fire from Heaven
, he asks me. He twists his hands over each other in a way I've never seen before and only read about. He's the only person I know who rubs his hands.

It's fine, I say. I liked it. Big Eric had urged me to go read this novel, and I checked it out from the library. When I got home with it, I realized why he wanted me to read it. The novel is about Alexander the Great, who has an affair with his older, adult teacher, when he is still a teenager.

He smiles. Beautiful, right? You should read the
The Persian Boy
, next. About his eunuch lover.

I will, I say.

Every now and then, I think of Ralph, dead Ralph. He wings in, hovers over the rehearsal chapel, paler than ever before because he is slowly fading away. I know it is not a proper haunting because no one else sees him. We sang for him at a memorial service, held for him in a country church up by the camp. It was a choral service, which is to say, we sang a selection of things, and then there were remembrances and a sung prayer.

Occasionally, I imagine that the ball-lightning of that night at camp was him, finally emerging from the lake, the part of him that really was lost to the depths now running loose, looking for its small body lying in its small grave. That he is now a Will-o'-the-Wisp.

Now that we wear these rope belts, I think of him often as I knot it. The boat rope, too thick for a child to loosen easily. Think of the boats, the oarlocks above him. When he turned his face in the rain to the bottom of the boat, I wonder, looking up at the cathedral ceiling, did he think of God? Did he think of Noah? What did he pray for?

And then Big Eric swings back into view. And I mutter, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, inside, in the mouth I keep in my mind, as opposed to the beautiful mouth, the real mouth, the slave that sings beautiful things. Or kisses.

18

AT SCHOOL NOW
, as it has been decided that I need friends, my mother has mentioned I must go out for a sport. I am a good swimmer, so these parents of mine decide that I must join the swim team. I am somewhat angry at my parents for being duped by my teachers this way but consent, because what else am I going to do?

The Cape Elizabeth High School swimming pool: Long thin windows band the walls reaching up to triple-height ceilings. The starting blocks at the shallow end remind me of altars. The pool has six lanes, is twenty-five yards long and is forever aquamarine, stinking of the chlorine acid poured in to clean the water. Now the time that I spent in the library between class and choir is spent here, doing laps. All those words, obliterated by this: I look to the pool bottom through goggles, where there is a single stripe at the bottom of each lane in the shape of the letter
I
.

We do drills for distance and speed. We separate out the elements of the stroke: first, just the arms, then just the legs, then the whole stroke, reassembled. We stretch, led in visualizations: Visualize yourself winning, my coach says, a young man watching his tiny potbelly, named Dan. See yourself ahead of everyone else. Do you see what that looks like?

I do. I see myself, having outdistanced them all. I begin to win races. I give the ribbons to my grandmother, who kisses them and then kisses me. My champion, she says. My grandfather laughs and rubs them in his fingers and he says, Fox is fast swimmer too.

I see Zach occasionally in the gym, when I have to do weight training. He is filling out from lacrosse. He shrugs. Says, Hey. We see each other less now, but my knowledge of him runs through these school rooms between us, so that some days, I feel like I know where he is no matter where he is. Other days, it feels like he doesn't even exist.

Come over, he says sometimes. Sometimes I do.

In Zach's room, we kiss. Like in a movie, long slow kisses, I count his teeth, he bites my lips. Today we haven't seen each other this way in over a month. When Little Eric's mom's car pulls up for choir car pool and honks, we separate and lie still for a moment, regarding each other: disheveled, our lips swollen. I need to put on jeans, he says. Go out and stall them. I wait a minute for him to pull off his shorts and then I get up, and pulling his penis toward me, give it a quick kiss, before heading out the door to tell Mrs. Johannsen that Zach will be right out.

Late October.

The concert where Peter is to sing the descant is held in St. Andrew's Cathedral. Zach and his parents come here. Stained-glass depictions of the lives of saints. A few angels on a mission. For the occasion we wear the robes and rope belts as we stand on the choir risers, a priory-in-miniature. The audience watches. We are halfway through the program and each pair of eyes in the audience, it seems, emits a force like a breeze—we stand before a gale of attention. The organ starts and we sing. I wait. Peter is to begin his descant. As I sing, it feels suddenly airless, as if in taking his breath, Peter has swept the atmosphere clean away. We hit the air repeatedly with the chords in our throats and bellies, making our devotions.

Peter opens his mouth. The first note pierces, the next goes inside the choir's airborne array, and then he is there, a part of us, all our tangling voices skein the air and Peter slips up, born aloft. My jealousy scrapes off as he keeps breathing, keeps sending more air through himself. Slow fire.

Love melts all our murder. As much as it makes it. Love melted me. Peter, it could only have been you.

Later, it is my turn in the program. I'd forgotten, in some bizarre way: the piece forced from my mind entirely. As we tuck the pages of our scores into place, Big Eric's eyes find mine. I sweat. All the colors around me leave. I don't remember more than the first three words. The people in the audience come into sharp focus, and I see small hats, wrinkles, tired eyes tired for years. Big Eric's eyes have the look of the owl now, but this time it's the owl descending. The owl who can see you from somewhere in the night sky, where the flying hides it.

Right inside my chest, a space opens. He brings to his mouth a mouth harp, and he whistles a tone for me to begin on. The tone opens in my chest, rolls over in language, opens my mouth. All along, I thought I was the one singing. I am not. He sings through me. He opens his mouth and I sing. My mouth is his.

Full Fathom Five my father lies . . .

At the entrance of the choir, as they surround me, I feel myself return. For the moment I was alone, I was gone. I vanished. I keep singing, though, for here I am, a song again.

Afterward, as we stand around, receiving our parents and friends, I want to walk away from here with Peter. I want the doors to St. Andrew's to fly open at heaven's bidding and on a plank of sunshine to walk right up to heaven with Peter, where, looking at God's face, we explode into flame, as all mortals do, looking on His countenance.

Instead, we return to the dressing room where we change in the smell of sweat socks and old dust, hang our robes, coil the ropes around the neck of the hanger. We climb into our clothes. We look at each other.

He knows.

All this singing seals something in. And so Peter says, You were really great.

In the dark gothic closet, dust spins around us. You were great, I say. In the only way. You were the only great thing.

No, you were, he says. You were.

I hug him to me and suddenly, I kiss him. On the mouth. Briefly. When I pull back, he's frozen in place. Looking off to the side.

Like a tap I feel Zach watching us from the door.

You both were great, he says. Now let's go.

Outside, my grandparents stand on the sidewalk, smiling hugely. Somehow, they seem stiller and stronger than the other people around them. As if gravity hugged them a little closer. Koreans very good singer, my grandmother says.

Yes, grandfather says. Very good singer. You have good Korean voice. Very strong.

My grandfather tells me again about how in Korea, everyone knows all the Korean songs, and sometimes, they start singing. On the bus, in the street. Everyone just singing, like in a musical. And for a second it seems like maybe I only wanted to sing because I am Korean, and not over there, with all the rest of them.

My grandparents haven't come to my concerts before now. They don't, in fact, often leave the property. My grandmother likes her garden. My grandfather likes our kitchen. But here they are, and at the sight of them everything evil in me seems to blow away, like dust from the top of a book. They hug me between them. Around us on the cold sidewalk the people my grandfather calls the potato people walk the streets, headed home.

19

BACKSTAGE. BIDDEFORD OPERA
House, opening night. We sit in our costumes, playing cards in our dressing room. Our faces are made up.

The diva slips into our dressing room, a beautiful young soprano by the name of Mare Winslow. Her hair is dyed red for the part. Her low-cut dress reveals a very full chest. She smiles at us. You're so beautiful, she says. All of you. Your voices, so beautiful.

She doesn't quite say it. That it's a pity, the voice won't stay. Some of us might end up with a contra-tenor, but that seems to me to be, at my childish vantage, wildly, unreasonably effeminate. A boy's voice is a masculine voice not in pitch but because it does not waver. I remember a rehearsal warm-up she attended, where my voice and Peter's remained, scaling up and up, and she said afterward, even I don't have that note. Envious then, she was a little like a child looking at monkeys climbing and wanting a tail.

Later, on stage, in the lights, her face slick with sweat, she radiates sound out to the audience in passionate bolts and rays. Tosca is demanding her lover repaint the eyes of the Mary Magdalene to match hers, that he blot out the eyes of the Marchese Attavanti, whose portrait he has incorporated into the picture there in the church.

I see as I watch, her comparison of our voices is a false one: a woman's voice
is
different, so very different, and hers, ridged by vibrato, cuts like a serrated blade, where we boys stab like swords—our voices tremble not at all. In this way, musically, innocence is represented. Knowledge, specifically knowledge of passion, makes you shake, apparently. As you answer for it before God, singing for your short, beautiful life to inch forward even by another minute. Even in the agony of loss is passion, is love, and measured against death this sort of pain is a feast, also, and requires a knife to carve it. Or so it seems, watching her run back and forth across the stage.

We have one other scene, apart from singing in the first act. In the second one, while Tosca rehearses, offstage, for her royal command performance at the Farnese Palace, we sing with her. We sing softly, to represent distance, and the composer has arranged Scarpia's interrogation in counterpoint to what we sing. And even later, at the beginning of the third act, as the prisoners wander the yard, Freddy Moran has a brief solo offstage, where he sings, I send you as many sighs as leaves rustle in the wind.

And then later, in the prison, Tosca sings with Cavaradossi, Our love will glow like a blazing rainbow over the sea. She says good-bye to him, before his execution, I'll close your eyes with a thousand kisses, I'll call you by a thousand names.